Rutan has said he'd love to win the X Prize before the December 3 centennial of the Wright brothers' first powered flight. To do so, however, he'll need to beat at least three teams that are fast on their way to rolling out space-ready hardware themselves - two with highly traditional systems and one with a much more radical vision. Unlike Rutan, with his space plane and mother ship concept, "we're building a real rocket, not just a ride on an airplane that goes into space," says Steven Bennett of Manchester, England-based Starchaser Industries. "In ours, you'll put on a space suit and get to do everything that John Glenn got to do." Bennett, a chemist who used to work in a toothpaste factory, is building a liquid oxygen and kerosene rocket similar to NASA's Saturn, which he plans to launch from Australia next year. "It's simple and straightforward and powerful," he says, "and there are many hundreds of man-years of research and published data you can tap into." So far he's fired 16 test rockets, 14 of which have been successful, including, in 2001, a 37-foot-long craft capable of carrying a man a mile high. His whole program, he says, will cost $5 million to $7 million, the money coming from selling seats to private investors.

In London, Ontario, industrial designer Geoff Sheerin is following a similar technological path. Backed by corporate investors, his Canadian Arrow team is reengineering the German V-2, a two-stage liquid oxygen and alcohol-fueled rocket first fired in World War II. "We didn't want to reinvent things," Sheerin says. "We could run off and design something very elaborate but decided to stick with what had been done before." Sheerin says he is weeks away from firing off his first full-scale 57,000-pound thrust engine, and his capsule is nearly complete.

Art StreiberBrian Binnie, one of four test pilots.

Perhaps the most unconventional challenge comes from John Carmack, who is creating a simple hydrogen peroxide-powered rocket vehicle. Instead of traditional fins, which Carmack says tend to break on landing, a computer will keep his vehicle stable by jiggling the throttles on its four engines 200 times a second. To cushion the impact of its parachute landing, the craft will land on a collapsible nose. Carmack has been testing the computer and engine control system via repeated flights of various subscale vehicles, including some carrying a passenger, and he thinks he's about a year away from going suborbital.

Carmack is pragmatic about how space exploration is luring him away from gaming. "We're always pushing hard for innovations in our gaming software, but if I disappeared tomorrow there'd be a lot of people doing similar things," he says. "It's appalling how in aerospace, we've been using the same stuff for decades. There's a big difference between what's been done and what's been possible and that's the definition of opportunity."

For now, Carmack, Sheerin, and Bennett say they're gunning strictly for the X Prize and the space tourism market, but they hint that tourism is only the beginning of their rocket dreams. Bennett brags that his system will be easily adaptable to do more. "All we have to do is soup up our rocket with a second stage and we can go straight to orbit," he crows. "Space will be an industry worth $10 billion, and I think investors will come out of the woodwork when someone wins the X Prize."

Carmack is more circumspect. "I think there's definitely a tourism market," he says, "but I don't know that it's huge." That's why he's looking at making a variety of spacecraft that could do everything from carry tourists to launch trinkets - or even go orbital. "You've got to build a lot of vehicles to learn. Space has been mythologized way out of proportion," Carmack says. "We've just not had enough people doing it to be comfortable with the challenges. We're blasť about doing remarkable things with electronics that are much more difficult than rocket science."

But can suborbital tourism really drive a new era in space exploration and commerce? Critics point out that there's no intermediate step between suborbital and orbital: Reaching 100 kilometers requires speeds of 2,500 mph; going orbital requires hitting 17,000 mph - which introduces complex challenges like the extreme heat generated when a craft exits or reenters the atmosphere at high speed. That's but one reason why, for instance, NASA pulled the plug on the X-33, a 1990s effort to create a reusable single stage-to-orbit concept demonstrator. "NASA spent a billion dollars on the X-33, 100 times more than the X Prize, and they couldn't make it work," says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and space policy consulting group in Alexandria, Virginia. "And the X-33 was just a subscale version of something that would have cost 10 times more than that. It costs $10,000 a pound to get into space, and the reason isn't the government - it's physics."

To him, the X Prize is just another dotcom illusion. "If there's some guy with $150,000 burning a hole in his pocket who wants to take a carnival ride to 100 kilometers instead of buying a sports car, more power to him," Pike says. "But the idea that the X Prize will enable humanity to slip the surly bonds of Earth and get us closer to the human exploration of Mars is ridiculous."

Art StreiberA simple composite, SS1 weighs 3,000 pounds sans engine.

General Worden, the Air Force's space transformation guru whose goals are more utilitarian than romantic, isn't so skeptical. "We're looking at 100-kilogram microsatellites we can launch for tactical purposes that might last only a few weeks, say for a war, like the one in Iraq. But the idea is to make launching them cheap - in the range of $5 million." Add a second stage to Rutan's basic concept, says Worden, and it might be capable of carrying a microsat to orbit. But even more important, he believes, is simply the Darwinian struggle unleashed by the X Prize to develop technology in the private sector. "These systems are significant because they're all privately funded," he says, "and that drives an attitude change we need in the government and the military - a change that says space isn't so special and so hard, and that could alter the game entirely."

SpaceDev, one of the companies vying for Rutan's engine contract, hopes to gain credibility for its hybrid motor and launch a new era of microsatellites. This year, as part of a NASA/UC Berkeley project, SpaceDev put a 130-pound satellite into orbit by piggybacking it onto a larger Boeing Delta II rocket, and it's hoping to go even smaller - to satellites the size of two decks of playing cards. "Network three of them together," says Jim Benson, SpaceDev's founder and CEO, "and just as PCs can be more powerful than mainframes, they'd have as much wallop as satellites the size of Greyhound buses. But what's missing is a small launch vehicle to put them into orbit." Whether there's a market for space tourism or not, Benson says, "working on SpaceShipOne has significantly enhanced the capabilities of our motors, and that's the important first step."

It's Saturday evening a week after the rollout, and a handful of Burt Rutan's family and close friends are waiting for him to come home from the hangar. He lives with his fourth wife in a white pyramid at the edge of the desert on Rutan Street, with a helipad steps from the front door. Inside there are almost no 90-degree angles; even the pool table in the raised living room is a trapezoid covered in gray felt, the balls red. A wall of mirrored shelves displays his Lindbergh Award and a dozen other medals. Suddenly, Rutan bounds in, grabs a can of root beer, and snaps on the giant TV that dominates the room. "ABC was there today," he announces, "and maybe I'm on Peter Jennings tonight." But there instead are American Edward Lu and Russian Yuri Malenchenko, waving as they board the Russian spaceship Soyuz for a trip to the space station. "Look!" he says. "You know how many people it takes to support them? A hundred thousand! Can you believe it? We could take that many people and throw them into the sky! For what?! I mean, there's no science up there at all. It's just politics!"

He grabs a plate of mashed potatoes and roast beef and heads over to a floor-to-ceiling mural depicting three large white pyramids glowing against a lush tropical background; toward the front, a strange creature strides across a white veranda. The mural was painted a week ago, and everyone is ogling it. "Giza plaza, 17,000 years ago," he explains. "See, I think the pyramids were made by aliens before the last ice age, and the ice destroyed them and they were just put back together by the Egyptians." Is he serious? "I've seen them and I'm an engineer, and you can't tell me that the technology is ancient Egyptian. If you were a superior race and you knew your time on Earth was ending, wouldn't you build something really big so people would know you'd been there?"

"So when are you going to space?" a neighbor asks.

"I don't know," he says, "but we'll do it fast."

"Any competitors?" wonders his father-in-law.

"No, none. I'm not worried about anyone."

"What's the payoff going to be when you win?" someone else pipes up.

"I don't care," he says, "and during the renaissance of aviation, from 1908 to 1912, no one cared either. Kelly Johnson, Howard Hughes, Werhner von Braun - those were my heroes, and their heroes were those early aviation pioneers. All I know is, we can't bore kids like we're boring them now. Who are their heroes going to be? I want to prove we can go to space cheaply and safely, because it's fun and exciting and challenging. I want to inspire people."

Rutan turns to the mural and says, "You know that face on Mars? NASA did the dumbest thing. They said it wasn't a face, it was a pile of rocks. If they'd said it was a face, they'd have full funding!"